R-E-S-P-E-C-T (find out what it means to me...)

I started to leave the following comment over on my friend, Johanna's blog, but it got to be so long that I thought I'd post it here instead:


Though there are times that I'd just like to strangle doctors who suggest that my medical problems and my chronic pain are all my fault. They're not me, and they don't know me better than I know me. There is no real motivation to lie about how I feel. I just want to feel "normal" again, period. There are some quacks out there who suggest that all my problems would be solved if I lost weight, but since I've had these problems (long before I knew what they were called) for most of my life, how do they know that the excess weight I carry is the cause of all my problems? I think it's a symptom, just like the pain is a symptom. It's too easy and convenient to blame my chronic pain on my weight.

I've shed too many tears over this for doctors to treat me like a hypocondriac or that it's all my fault. Doctors do not go to medical school to play God, but some of them think (whether they admit it or not) they hold my future and my health in their hands because I came to them for help. Doesn't the Hippocratic Oath state: First do no harm? Some doctors harm their patients by not taking them and their pain (or other problems) seriously.

I know I've been labelled a "difficult" patient because I have no problem telling a doctor he's full of it. There's this one pain management doc in Massachusetts who treated me so badly, and with such comtempt, that when he came in to see me during one appointment and started telling me that I needed a shrink and not a pain management clinic, I told him point blank that the appointment was over. And I started to gather up my stuff and leave. When he objected to this, I said, "We're done, doc. Please leave the room so I can get dressed." I later wrote a letter to the Massachusetts medical board to complain. It wasn't until I had my administrative SSA hearing last year that I found out this quack had labelled me as "difficult". But I kinda thought he would. He pissed me off. And I called him on it.



Well, that's the whole thing I typed. I left a much shorter comment instead. I didn't want her server to crash because I became so verbose.

There are definitely doctors I don't respect. They're in it for the big bucks. "MD" does not stand for "Make Dollars". The doctors who get my respect have respect for their patients. The ones who say, okay you have a problem, lets work together to fix it.


--MorelaterZ--